The XMM-Newton X-ray telescope has discovered huge reserves of gas and dust in the "void" between the filaments of the "cosmic web" of the universe, whose discovery explains the loss of about half of the matter in the Universe, according to an article published in the journal Nature.
“We have come close to solving the main riddle of modern astrophysics. We know that this matter existed, as we see it in the early Universe, but today we cannot find any traces of it. The question arises - where did she disappear?”- says Fabrizio Nicastro from the National Astrophysical Institute of Italy in Rome.
Holes in the web of the universe
The universe is believed to be similar in structure to a giant three-dimensional web. Its threads are clusters of dark matter, the so-called filaments. At the points of intersection of these filaments there are dense lumps of visible matter - individual galaxies and groups of stellar megacities.
Scientists study the structure of this web by observing thousands of distant galaxies using ground-based and orbiting telescopes and fluctuations of the so-called relict radiation - the "echo" of the Big Bang, in which information about the distribution of dark matter in the Universe was imprinted.
These observations relatively recently pointed to an extremely unexpected thing - it turned out that the total mass of matter in the threads of this "web" and in the space between them is approximately two times less than predicted by theoretical calculations. The question arose - where did this matter disappear, over which scientists are still struggling.
The search for this "universal loss", as Nikastro explains, is significantly complicated by one property of the Universe convenient for us - it is almost completely transparent to electromagnetic waves due to the fact that all reserves of intergalactic gas are in a fully ionized state.
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For this reason, scientists cannot directly calculate the number of atoms of hydrogen, helium and other elements in the void between the threads of the "web of the universe", since they hardly interact with light and other forms of radiation.
"X-ray" of a black hole
Nicastro and his colleagues solved this problem by trying to find not hydrogen or helium, but other, heavier ions that interact more strongly with beams of soft X-rays and other types of waves that produce quasars, supermassive black holes in the centers of distant galaxies.
Oxygen, nitrogen, carbon and other heavy elements are extremely rare in the intergalactic environment - they did not exist at the time of the Big Bang and could only get there from galaxies along with the ejections of black holes and supernovae. Therefore, scientists had to spend a lot of time looking for a sufficiently bright and close to us quasar, whose X-ray would be strong enough to "illuminate" the rarest atoms of heavy elements.
This role was approached by the galaxy 1ES 1553 + 113, located in the constellation Serpent at a distance of seven billion light years from Earth. She, as noted by Nicastro and his colleagues, is located at a great distance from the known clusters of galaxies, which allowed them to use her light to estimate the amount of heavy elements in the void between the filaments of the "cosmic web".
Observing it with the XMM-Newton orbiting telescope for two years, scientists have found traces of the existence of two giant clouds of gas in the intergalactic medium, filled with oxygen and ions of other heavy atoms.
Their mass, in turn, indicates that such structures contain from 20% to 100% of all “missing” matter in the Universe. Scientists are now planning to make new measurements of this kind, using other quasars, which will help them narrow the range of estimates and understand whether the gas clouds on the way between the Earth and 1ES 1553 + 113 are unique objects, or to prove that they are found in all corners of the universe. …
